Marketing Yourself as an Artist: A Quick How To

Marketing

As an upcoming artist is not an easy to market yourself these days. Questions like, “what social media platform should I be on”, “what do I share”, “how much do I share” and “how do I manage it all on my own” are just a few artists and musicians struggle with. To help you navigate, we came up with a few basics marketing ideas that may help you get going. If this is beneficial, we’ll do some more in the weeks to come.

Creativity

Ever heard people say: “Everything has been done before”? Well, that’s kinda true. Covering an artist’s song on YouTube to benefit from that song’s chart success may seem like a good idea, but there’s nothing exciting about another “All of Me” or “Shape of You” cover. However, doing something that’s been done before with a creative twist always attracts eyeballs. Whether is something unexpected, something opposite of the usual, or shot from an unusual angle, or using a different medium could be a winning strategy – but don’t go overboard and turn it into a gimmick. You don’t want to be known for the rest of your career as the skydiving cover singer.

Collaboration

Cross-pollination is key to marketing and getting your music in front of people who otherwise may not have seen or heard it. Collaborating with other musicians, dancers, choreographers, visual artists can help the both of you. By posting the song on each other’s social media platforms is helpful promotion. Your partner will have fans that will fall in love with your stuff and vice versa. Do you understand now how DJ Khaled became such a big star? That’s right; collaboration.

Capture

This one seems obvious and simple, but few people do it these days: capturing your fan’s data, starting with an email address.

Everyone is obsessed with getting likes, and growing their followers by jumping through all kinds of get-rich-quick schemes: #follow4follow #like4like #followback and buying followers/like through PayPal scams and even apps – sound familiar? But you don’t “own” any of those fans, or have any control about who you reach. You are depending on a platform, and its algorithms, which forces you to consistently push your content to reach the same people over and over again. Think about it. The platform benefits from you pushing more and more content (and in some cases they even own it!)

Basic Facebook and Instagram analytics will tell you the sex, age demographic, location of your followers and perhaps the time they are online, but that’s about it. You don’t know your customers. You don’t know who bought a ticket to your show, you don’t know who streams your songs on Spotify. Who do you market to for your next song release? What kind of an engagement do you get on social media? Some of your fans only use it once a day and may have missed your post. You could be sitting in their email box with that information right now. Everyone still reads email!

What if the social network you rely on suddenly decides to shut its doors (Vine?), or becomes unpopular (MySpace)? You will have to start all over again somewhere else… Is that kind of investment and commitment worth it? You could be building your email list today – spoiler alert: you should – and reach your fans anytime, every time.

Hopefully, these quick marketing tips will help you put together a basic content plan. Let us know your thoughts on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Come back for more on Jellynote Blog.